Which games would you like to be supported on the future?

All the inane chatter goes in here. If you're curious about whether we will support a game, post HERE not in General Discussion :)

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DrMcCoy
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Re: And now for some rather uncommon game proposals

Post by DrMcCoy »

Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:you must have people clamouring for inclusion of other AGI-game-clones, like Hugo's House of Horrors
...Which is currently being worked on and in a semi-working state.
Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:Then there's the tip of the iceberg into Germany's vast and under-represented adventure game tradition
There's loads of advertisment / free educational games I for one have some emotional attachment to. Of course, I already have too many unfinished projects on my hands as it is... :P
Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:So these won't enter the SCUMMVM stable until pigs fly
Well, not unless there's people working on it... You seem to have some time, it seems... (*hint-hint*) :P
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Post by Pseudo_Intellectual »

...Which is currently being worked on and in a semi-working state.
You bet! It thrills me! I'm just... looking out to our current boundaries, then to what's just beyond them. I also would have lodged a vote for Maddog Williams but I found that some lonely soul had previously mentioned it here, unlike most of my real outsider titles.
Well, not unless there's people working on it... You seem to have some time, it seems... (*hint-hint*)
Most of my time was spent just writing that post; as for time, if only it were enough -- but I have a severe knowledge deficit where programming is concerned. (My hours at age 5 on the TRS-80 CoCo in the basement haven't served me well...) If I could, I can assure you that you'd have a dozen more vestigial engines in progress at the absolute lowest rung of the ladder.

While I'm grandstanding here, I'll continue -- since with the introduction of text-parser games (those early AGI ones again that have gotten us into such trouble already) we're seeing some primitive titles in the first wave of adventure games, I'd like to lodge a vehement, if ineligible, vote to incorporate the functional Gargoyle engine (interpreter of numerous text adventure formats) into the main distribution. Any development that in a single stroke multiplies by a hundred the amount of games supported by your project can't be a bad thing. They're all adventures! Just... some of them benefit less from mouse support and anti-aliasing 8)
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Post by DrMcCoy »

Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:Most of my time was spent just writing that post
Time that you could have spent doing something useful instead...
Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:but I have a severe knowledge deficit where programming is concerned.
Then I've got great news for you: there's now a process which helps you aquire missing knowledge! It's called "learning".
Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:I'd like to lodge a vehement, if ineligible, vote to incorporate the functional Gargoyle engine (interpreter of numerous text adventure formats) into the main distribution.
Yeah, there already was a discussion about that. And the final decision was that it doesn't belong into ScummVM.

Even I -- and I'm quite an "inclusionist" -- didn't really think it fits. When playing text adventures, I like to have the features (and feel) of a terminal: copy & pasting, input sequences like ^W for delete word, etc.. ScummVM doesn't provide that, isn't laid-out for that.
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Post by Pseudo_Intellectual »

DrMcCoy wrote:Time that you could have spent doing something useful instead...
Hey, be nice -- I made the effort to make my list of unreasonable proposals one that wouldn't just be the broken record of ones you've heard here a thousand times 8)

As one of my existing specialties is populating wikis with content (as at Mobygames: I don't know how to program, but I'm certainly qualified to type in credits from manuals -- which at some point may yield the right name for a researcher to contact about permission or help making an old game work correctly 8), one useful thing I could do is get in there and make entries for everyone's dumb suggestions, accompanied where possible by its priority status or reason why it will explicitly NEVER be supported by SCUMMVM (or rather, the mountains that will have to be moved until a given title is ready for consideration.)
DrMcCoy wrote:Then I've got great news for you: there's now a process which helps you aquire missing knowledge! It's called "learning".
It occurred to me that the sort of people with the spare time needed to work on projects like this are retired ones, who must in some cases also be the people sitting on the original knowledge that put the games together in the first place!

While SCUMMVM is an excellent excuse to start to learn how to program (and disassemble, etc), just-started-learning programmers aren't very useful for the project; rather than learning how to program, I'd figure my time would be much better spent evangelising SCUMMVM to people who already know how to program 8)
DrMcCoy wrote:Yeah, there already was a discussion about that. And the final decision was that it doesn't belong into ScummVM.
Well, it was worth a shot. And that decision being made doesn't mean it's impossible it might be revisited again in the future!

Apropos of nothing, it seems to me that the holy grail for the project given its look-and-feel mandate will really be getting AGS support; I understand that general policy for SCUMMVM is to present a public position that support for a given game will never be undertaken and is not planned for any time in the future until it's well enough along that it will soon be complete: as with SCI games, the party line has been something like No NO NO no NO no No no Never not a chance actually it's looking more likely now.

I understand that AGS is somewhere on the fifth no and that the main obstacle is on its gatekeeper's side. From the outside (for non-programmers, "outside" in this case is a very large area) the precise reasons for this remain somewhat elusive. So Chris Jones won't make his source available while he's alive -- but can we compel him to make preparations to spill the goods in some decades when he eventually passes on so those games can finally be brought into the fold? Or does he plan for AGS registrations to support his grandchildren in luxury? Maybe it's a financial matter? I'm sure most AGS authors would love to have their games supported on all the platforms SCUMMVM runs on. If he named a ridiculous fee (as the Rolling Stones did when asked by Bill Gates how much it would cost to license "Start Me Up" for the Win95 launch) it might be a trivial matter of a kickstarter account and a few months of facebook campaigning to generate the revenue neded to overcome the obstacle.
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Post by bobdevis »

If you care about text adventures, pick up some JavaScript skills and make it run in-browser.
It would be a perfect first-real-project kind of thing for an aspiring programmer.....
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Post by DrMcCoy »

Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:Hey, be nice
Sorry, I don't do nice.
Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:as at Mobygames: I don't know how to program, but I'm certainly qualified to type in credits from manuals
Apropos manual: A big sore point for some of the devs has always been the lack of a proper ScummVM manual. We could certainly use someone who's got the time of collecting together the info in the README and Wiki to produce a such a manual.
Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:one useful thing I could do is get in there and make entries for everyone's dumb suggestions, accompanied where possible by its priority status or reason why it will explicitly NEVER be supported by SCUMMVM (or rather, the mountains that will have to be moved until a given title is ready for consideration.)
The big common theme you'll find is that there's a huge lack of people with time and knowledge for all these games.
That one's actually the big kicker; everything else isn't even worth thinking about until you've got people who like to take up the job.
Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:It occurred to me that the sort of people with the spare time needed to work on projects like this are retired ones, who must in some cases also be the people sitting on the original knowledge that put the games together in the first place!
No, that's completely off. The sort of people working on projects like ScummVM are the ones that played the games back in the days, often as kids.
Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:Apropos of nothing, it seems to me that the holy grail for the project given its look-and-feel mandate will really be getting AGS support
Yeah, Chris Jones has, multiple times and quite vehemently expressed his will for not having the source open and not having people RE AGS. For utterly stupid reasons.
I for one have utter contempt for him. I don't want anything to do with him, and I certainly wouldn't want to give him money. But that may be just me.
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Post by eriktorbjorn »

bobdevis wrote:If you care about text adventures, pick up some JavaScript skills and make it run in-browser.
It would be a perfect first-real-project kind of thing for an aspiring programmer.....
Incidentally, there already are JavaScript implementations of the Z-Machine and the Glulx VM.
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Post by head2003 »

I vote for most of the games in this thread, but nobody vote for Murder on Mississippi ... but it is c64/Apple II only, dont know if this is possible :D

Edit: Oops changed german link to english :)
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Post by fingolfin »

There is nothing to vote on here, though.
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Post by head2003 »

fingolfin wrote:There is nothing to vote on here, though.
My english is not the best xD with "vote" i want to say something like "wish" :)
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Post by Pseudo_Intellectual »

Pseudo_Intellectual wrote:Apropos of nothing, it seems to me that the holy grail for the project given its look-and-feel mandate
... supposing that the sweet spot for SCUMMVM is a certain intersection of technology (Stuff That We Already Know How It Works Or Can Get Someone To Show Us) and game design aesthetics (ie. 2D point'n'click adventure games), it doesn't seem to me that surveying and cataloging the field would be UNuseful. The third z-axis of that locus is of course "And I Know How To Laboriously Make It Work In Our Existing Framework And Am Interested In Doing So" and having such a catalog wouldn't necessarily advance that particular dimension, but could at least be a good resource to throw in the face of forum tourists such as myself: please don't request games already on the list unless you have new information about an easier way to implement their inclusion.

Such a list could be sorted and ranked in terms of "depth of snow that would have to accumulate in Hell before this game is supported" (ie what technological, aesthetic, closed-source, copyright, ownership obstacles are in the way). Then at least the maximum potential scope of the project could be /known/.

If I could figure out how to make an account on the wiki, I might happily gradually produce such a list. It's not clear however that such a survey would be of any interest or value to the coders knee-deep in the SCUMMVM trenches.

In any case, kudos on the SCI support! That there's a pretty earthshaking development.
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Post by monster99f150 »

Journeyman Project Turbo
Journeyman Project 2: Buried in time
Journeyman Project Pegasus Prime
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Post by clone2727 »

monster99f150 wrote:Journeyman Project Turbo
Journeyman Project 2: Buried in time
Entirely hardcoded, would be a major pain to code.
monster99f150 wrote: Journeyman Project Pegasus Prime
Doable. I may look into it in the far future should I have the time (after Mohawk work, etc.).
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Post by MusicallyInspired »

What's Pegasus Prime? I only heard of Legacy of Time.
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Post by monster99f150 »

Check out videos of it on youtube. Its a remake of the first Journeyman Project video game, with much better graphics...made by the same authors, but it was mac only. Very stupid, and makes alot of people sad.
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